Hot-melt adhesives--which have the capacity to bond various substrates once the adhesive has been softened by heating--also find use as adhesives for bonding semiconductor elements to the corresponding element attachment sites. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid Open (Kokai or Unexamined) Number Sho 61-201432 (201,432/1986) teaches a method in which a hot-melt adhesive is first coated on an integrated circuit-bearing silicon wafer and the semiconductor elements cut from that wafer are then bonded to their attachment sites.
However, since hot-melt adhesives employ a heat softening regimen, their use to bond a semiconductor element to its attachment site has been associated with the problem of an inability to achieve highly precise bonding due to outflow of the adhesive into the area surrounding the element and variations in the thickness of the adhesive. Moreover, hot-melt adhesives have had a poor stress-relaxation capacity under challenge by thermal shock, which has resulted in a reduced device reliability for semiconductor devices containing a semiconductor element that has been bonded to its attachment site by a hot-melt adhesive.